The best Argentina needs a better Milei

President Javier Milei’s administration is enjoying the most favourable terms of trade in the country’s history. This is the difference between the price of the things a country sells to the world versus the price of what it purchases from the world. This means the country is getting a windfall of income and that the government in power should do very well.

That’s why it is surprising that Milei is lagging in polls. His numbers have been stuck in the 33 to 35 percent territory for five months now, not going further down but not picking up either. They are at their lowest since he became President almost three years ago.

The data shows that governments in this position cruise to victory. Previous peaks like this include the zenith of Juan Domingo Perón and Evita Perón’s popularity in the late 1940s or Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s 2011 re-election with 54 percent of the votes in the first round. 

Milei’s Presidency is at a crucial hinge-point, which is starting to look similar to the one he faced in the run-up to the 2025 midterm elections. Back then, the fear that the opposition could win risked triggering a vicious circle that would feed into a run on the peso and Milei’s main achievement: decelerating inflation. The cycle is somewhat starting all over again now: a weak President who cannot guarantee re-election feeds a cycle of uncertainty that keeps some investors on a wait-and-see mode – and others gearing toward panic.

This is not rational. The fundamentals of Argentina’s economy are better than they have been at any other time in more than a decade. The world is helping with high commodity prices (especially soybeans and oil), which are partially offset by international interest rates ticking up a bit. The opposition is still nowhere to be found, and the main potential opposition candidate, Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof, goes to Washington to tell investors, in other words, that he is not a Communist monster. Economy Minister Luis Caputo later described him otherwise: “Kicillof is the Antichrist and Kirchnerism is hell.”

The best thing that could happen for the government is for investors to understand that next year’s election will not be a life or death matter in Argentina. For all the political polarisation, the overall trajectory of the country’s economy has entered a different era that will continue – with shades of grey – regardless of who wins office.

This creates a major dilemma for the incumbent. Fear of a past of hyperinflation and economic mismanagement is in part what got him to win the midterms in 2025, next to Donald Trump’s support and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s wallet. But the trick might get rusty with repetition: the past is more distant, and the public attributes whatever happens in their daily lives to whoever is running the show right here right now. 

Milei might suffer from the same syndrome that affected the Kirchner era, initially floating very successfully thanks to a sound economic programme, only to drown due its own imperfections and political stubbornness. When Cristina Fernández de Kirchner got 54 percent of the votes in 2011, she and her loyalists widened the political gap instead of seeking to breach it, which led first to a defeat in 2015 and then to an unmanageable Alberto Fernández government, which was plagued with infighting and lack of direction. Fernandez de Kirchner’s star has been waning since then, slowly but surely. Today, she is jailed under house arrest.

Since that CFK 2011 landslide, no government has been re-elected in Argentina, part of an anti-incumbent trend that has gripped the entire region and arguably the Western Hemisphere. It is increasingly difficult to govern publics, exuding social media emotions, in often-deteriorating economic environments. Countries and governments do not have many realistic chances of succeeding.

Yet success is better shown than told. Milei keeps telling whoever wants to listen, as he did during the “Argentine Week” for investors in Paris this week, that he is delivering an economic “miracle” – maybe not noticing that the miracle is the opportunity the country has in front of it, an historic chance. The delta between the language and the perceived reality of his voters might be growing intolerably wide, as the economy walks into a technical recession in the third quarter, even with Vaca Muerta drilling at record output and mining at all-time-high exports. 

A convincing re-election would need a much better Milei than the one we are getting, one who is less concerned about being right and more about empathising with the people he is meant to represent. Otherwise he might sooner than later become another footnote in Argentina’s anecdotal political life.